Lecture date: 2001 10 23
Best known as a historian, writer and critic, William Curtis also takes photographs and produces abstract drawings, reliefs and paintings that he terms mental landscapes. These works draw inspiration from multiple sources – Aboriginal bark paintings, textiles, twentieth-century abstraction and maps – and are suggestive of the sea, clouds, rock strata. However, they deliberately evade description and categorisation and this is reflected in Curtis’s reluctance to give his pieces titles. In this lecture he discusses the motivation for these works, and the techniques he uses in their conception and execution.
